Re: the " 'official' point of view" expressed by kernelnewbies.org regarding reiser4 inclusion

Adrian Bunk
2006-07-27T12:18:13Z

On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 01:52:29PM +0200, andrea@cpushare.com wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 08:56:03AM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
>...
> > It was you who wrongly said:
> > "With KLive I can attempt to estimate market share of _kernel_ code"
> >
> > Hadn't you read your own disclaimer?
>
> There is no contradiction in the two statements. To attempt to
> estimate something I don't need a reliable sample of the whole
> population. Estimation is still a statistical thing. Also I said

Sure, you don't need any data to estimate anything.

But if your estimate is based on bad data it sounds better than if it
was based on no data although the value of the estimate is the same.

> attempt to estimate, it doesn't mean I will make it.

Giving low quality raw data and then saying "it wasn't me who did the
estimate" is silly.

> If you don't consider those results a positive for reiser4, it can
> only mean you expected reiser4 to have a much higher share among the
> KLive users. This is obvious.

That's completely wrong.
I consider those results neither positive nor negative for reiser4.

They could only be considered positive if someone expected less than
35 reiser4 users worldwide.

> > Every time someone will repeat the "1:5 ratio for reiser4:ext3 users",
> > this will be an additional proof it's really worse than no data.
>
> If they say "1:5 ratio for reiser4:ext3 KLive users" everything will
> be correct and nobody can object because it's a fact.

And 90% of all people will misread it.

And many people will spread it wrong.

That's exactly where such data is worse than no data.

You could claim you know your the suboptimal quality of the data and
that you had a disclaimer.

But did you read Hans' reaction on your email?

If you are intelligent (which I assume), you should have learned by this
how to not present your data.

> I said myself that I'm no reiserfs user, and I don't plan to become
> one any time soon (especially on my production systems), I'm only
> reporting plain numbers as KLive measured the stuff. I'm surprised as
> much as you are, but then I've to report facts, and not my own
> opinions.
>...

I have no plans to use reiser4 myself (I'm a happy ext2 user).
But I'm not against mergng reiser4, either.

I'll leave this technical discussion to the people who know more about
this.

cu
Adrian

--

"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed